Slacy’s Blog

One problem you might find if you send all your e-mail to your phone is that you’re constantly getting the “new e-mail” notification, and that means it becomes sort of useless, and you’ll begin to ignore your inbox (again).

The best solution to this is to create a set of filters for your e-mail, and apply labels to messages you don’t want to receive notifications for.  What other e-mail programs call “Folders”, are referred to as “Labels” in GMail.  (Although, unlike folders, one message can have multiple Labels)

One other thing you’ll need to remember is that GMail uses the term “Archive” to mean “Remove from your inbox”.  Archived messages are only visible through the Web UI and searches.  Think of it like “I’m done reading this but I don’t want to delete it.”

There’s a fairly easy way to set up Filters & Labels built into GMail:

1. Go to your GMail Inbox
2. Select a bunch of related messages (from a mailing list, of a given topic, etc.) that you’d rather not receive notifications for on your phone.
3. Click on “More Actions” in the top bar of buttons, and pull down to “Filter messages like these”
4. Make sure that the list of matching messages looks correct to you and click “Next Step”
5. Select the “Skip the Inbox” and “Apply the label” checkboxes.  Use the dropdown to create a new label if you’d like.
6. Click Create Filter

Done!  Now, all messages that are of the type you selected will skip the inbox (be automatically Archived) and will also get the label you selected.

By default, the GMail application on your phone only sync’s your Inbox, but you can always view other labels on your phone, and you can even set up syncing for those labels as well.   You can view messages with any label by pressing Menu from inside the GMail application, then selecting “View Labels”

To set which labels are sync’d to the phoneOn your Android, run the GMail application, and…

1. Press Menu
2. Select “Settings”
3. Select “Labels”
4. Find the labels you want and set the sync durations for those labels.

If you find that your phone often says “Lodaing…” when viewing your Inbox, then you need to sync more days of your Inbox.

When you activated your Android phone, you had to provide a “Google Account” to sync it to.  Generally, this is an @gmail.com address, but could actually be any google-provided account, for example, if you use Google Apps for your Domain, you can provide your own domain’s e-mail account and password.

Once you’ve set up the phone and tied it to your Google account, your mail & contacts from GMail will be automatically syncchronized with your phone, almost instantaneously.

So, what you should do is take your address book (in whatever format you currently have it) and import it into your GMail contacts.

1. Log in to GMail, using the account you’ve snyc’d with your phone
2. Click “contacts” on the left hand side.
3. Click “import” in the upper right hand corner.
4. Upload your export file, adding these contacts to a new group called something like “Imported Contacts”
5. Use the web interface to manually edit & add to any of the contacts, moving them to new groups if necessary.

Remember that it’s always possible to add & edit contacts via the GMail user interface — you don’t have to use your phone!  I find it much easier to use the web interface than the phone interface.

If the import process created duplicate contacts, then you can easily de-dupe them in the contacts UI.

1. Go to the contacts section of GMail
2. Type a search term that matches 2 or more duplicate entries. (If there is no such term, just skip this step)
3. Select the checkbox next to each item you’d like to merge together
4. There should be a link on the right that says “Merge these 2 contacts”   Click on it
5. You’ll be taken to the merged contact info.  Make sure it’s correct, and save the contact.

Remember that it’s also useful to create contacts in GMail even if people don’t have an e-mail address (for example, your grandparents) because it’ll show up on your phone and you can call them.

If you add an address to the contact, then it’ll be very easy to Navigate to their address using the builtin navigation system!

I even like creating contacts for things like my favorite restaurants and take-out places.  It makes them easy to call, and easy to navigate to!

Thanks Paul and Greg for the advice on backing up my GMail account.  Although fetchmail seems to work for some users, there are a couple of easier to use scripts out there.

Paul pointed me at Matt Cutts’ great blog post about using the getmail script to archive GMail.

Greg pointed me at libgmail which comes with some simple driver scripts to download all your content.  You can get it from the sourceforge.net page, and read more on the libgmail author’s website.

I’m running a big batch getmail run now, and putting all the messages in MailDir format.  The thing that I’m actually looking for is a way to preserve GMail’s label structure using hard or soft links in a MailDir-like format, for easy searching.   I suspect that libgmail will allow this, but I haven’t dug into it enough to know for sure.

There are many guides to using fetchmail to backup your gmail account, but I use Google Apps For Your Domain to host my mail.  So, I needed to craft up a slightly modified version of the fetchmail commandline:

$ fetchmail –ssl -p pop3 -vk –user slacy@slacy.com pop.gmail.com

The funny thing is that within a few minutes of running this script, I got e-mails from my friends saying “Hey, did you mean to send this to me” and “I got this weird message about delivery failure from you”.

Reading the fetchmail man page in more detail, it says that after fetching the mail, it delivers it via the local delivery agent.  In my case, I suspect that what’s happening is that it’s going to my local SMTP server, which is set up to forward back to GMail, and I think that somehow created the re-sending.

If you have any other ideas how or why a fetchmail run would re-send old messages to other recipeients, let me know.  I’m going to have to do a fair amount of digging before I re-run the script.